This Friday’s featured artist is Doug Beube and his amazing mixed-media sculptural work! I love the complexity and uniqueness of his map art!

He writes:Viewers are familiar with common objects such as books, atlases, fur, ceramic and wood. These are some of the materials used in my sculptures. The viewer visually engages with the re-contextualized artwork, which might otherwise have gone unnoticed in its customary setting, and participates in its transformation through a critique or dialogue.

Border Crossing

Border Crossing details

Doug states:By cutting atlas pages in half and then stitching separator zippers onto the cut edges, it enabled me to reconstitute the atlas pages by zipping a portion of one map to the remnant of another in a analog version of “cutting” and “pasting.” These colorful folios with relief views of land formations and bodies of water with abstract markings can then be unfastened and refastened in a vast number of combinations, challenging our notions of geographical borders. They can also be viewed laid out on a plane or constructed as prisms and other shapes that transform the flat space into peaks and valleys, playing again on our concepts of geography. In this way, our notion of the codex, which traditionally has a fixed number of pages bound in a common spine, is expanded and becomes more versatile. A system using zippers is open; pages can be added, deleted, or interchanged at will.

Crater

Crater detail

Crater detail

He says:The large-format maps from The Times Atlas of the World, Northern Europe, Vol. III provided an expansive area for this excavation. The crater-like opening on the top map is cut from the topography of Switzerland. Even a country that considers itself politically neutral is not immune to global devastation, including the effects of changes in the climate and environment. More immediately, the cavernous rupture calls to mind the crater of a meteor smashing into the earth or a missile hitting its target—or missing it by geopolitical accident—thus suggesting that no national mandate can guarantee invulnerability to such events.

Legend and Legend detail

Doug explains:Black gouache obliterates all the names of lands and seas and all other text printed on a schoolroom globe, except for a single word: the eponymous “Legend.” In effect of this creative act, a black veil shrouds the sphere—the landmasses, most heavily so. All hierarchies and other distinctions among nations struggling to perpetuate political structures are eliminated. Because conquest is accompanied by naming, Legend suggests the end of regime change or colonization—perhaps even a utopian vision of one world. On the other hand, the erasure of these names one by one could also imply the loss or malleability of these geographical locations from acts of invasion, erosion, globalization, pollution, or war.

Strike Anywhere

Strike Anywhere detail

He points out:Strike Anywhere is both the brand name of the distinctive red-and-white tipped matches in this piece as well as a reference to the method of igniting a match by swiping its sulfur-covered end against any coarse surface. Of course, the act of blanketing a globe with these matches suggests the vast potential for local, global, or even cosmic conflagration by man-made or even natural causes.